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Thursday, February 21, 2013

Jury hears from Depuy complaint and Vigilance Manager

excerpts from the Trial

Bloomberg

........Jurors also heard from Paul Arnott, DePuy’s complaint and vigilance manager since 2003. He testified that while all reports of ASR revisions were supposed to go to his department, many didn’t. Instead, he said, many went to a University of Hamburg professor, Michael Morlock, a consultant to the company. Jurors heard from another witness that surgeons sent explanted hips to Morlock.

Professor Morlock

“DePuy sales people were informing surgeons to send all revisions to Professor Morlock and not report to the complaint department,” Arnott testified.

Morlock, he said, considered his work to be independent research and not part of DePuy’s complaints process.

“We would want all revisions reported to us,” Arnott said. “He said it was not his job to decide what information should be passed on to surgeons, but that if it helped surgeons do their work better, it should be.”

Arnott said that he prepared a recall letter in January 2010, or eight months before J&J recalled the hips. The company’s Health Hazard Evaluation committee rejected a recall, he said, and sent a so-called field safety notice.

“The HHE committee, based on all the available data that they reviewed, didn’t feel that it warranted a return of medical device to the manufacturer,” he said.
The case is Kransky v. DePuy, BC456086, California Superior Court, Los Angeles County (Los Angeles).

To contact the reporters on this story: Maurice Possley in Los Angeles Superior Court atmauricepossley@gmail.com; David Voreacos in Newark, New Jersey, at dvoreacos@bloomberg.net